Aileen Cannon Working Hard to Protect Stan Woodward; Doing Nothing to Protect Walt Nauta or Carlos De Oliveira

/228 Comments/in , , /by

In this post, I noted all the things in DOJ’s reply on their motion for a Garcia hearing that had to have come from the grand jury, and assumed that DC Chief Judge James Boasberg must have permitted DOJ to share it.

As described here, yesterday’s reply on the motion for a Garcia hearing in the stolen documents case revealed a good deal of grand jury information about Yuscil Taveras’ testimony.

It revealed:

  • Trump’s IT worker, Taveras, testified (falsely, the government claims) in March
  • DOJ obtained two more subpoenas for surveillance footage, on June 29 and July 11, 2023 (the existence of those subpoenas, but not the date, had already been disclosed in a discovery memo)
  • It included the docket number associated with the conflict review — 23-GJ-46 — and cited Woodward’s response to the proceedings
  • James Boasberg provided Taveras with conflict counsel
  • Taveras changed his testimony after consulting with an independent counsel

Under grand jury secrecy rules, DC Chief Judge Boasberg would have had to approve sharing that information, but the docket itself remains sealed and Boasberg has not unsealed any of the proceedings.

A filing submitted from DOJ shows that I was right.

It also shows that Judge Aileen Cannon and Walt Nauta attorney Stan Woodward are engaged in a game that is doing nothing to ensure that Nauta’s getting unconflicted legal representation, but it is protecting Trump’s protection racket.

Let’s review the timeline.

On August 2, DOJ filed their original motion for a Garcia hearing, describing, generally, that Yuscil Taveras had testified against Nauta, which presented a conflict for Woodward, even before you consider the three other possible trial witnesses — of seven remaining witnesses — he also represents. DOJ submitted a sealed supplement with information on those three as well as other information, “to facilitate the Court’s inquiry.” Five days later, Cannon ordered that filing stricken, stating that, the government had, “fail[ed] to satisfy the burden of establishing a sufficient legal or factual basis to warrant sealing the motion and supplement.” In her drawn out briefing schedule on the question, she instructed Stan Woodward to address, “the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district.”

On August 17, Woodward responded. He contended that Garcia hearings only covered when an attorney represented two defendants, but ultimately argued that, rather than adopt a more traditional method of resolving such a conflict (such as replacing Woodward), Judge Cannon should exclude Taveras’ testimony.

The government’s reply — filed on August 22 — is the one that made public more, damning, information on what went down in June and July.

Three more days passed before Woodward submitted a furious motion requesting opportunity to file a sur-reply. In it, filed 23 days after DOJ’s original submission and sealed filing, he accused DOJ of contravening, “a sealing order issued by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia,1” though in a rambling footnote, he admitted maybe DOJ had requested to unseal this ex parte.

1. Defense counsel is not currently aware of any application by the government to unseal defense counsel’s submission. To have done so ex parte is arguably less professional than deliberately violating the Court’s sealing order. The government did not solicit defense counsel’s position on the unsealing of defense counsel’s own submission, but appears to have deliberately misled both the District Court for the District of Columbia and this Court. Of course, if they did seek such an application ex parte, this would be the second time in as many weeks that the government has done so – a particularly ironic approach given the Special Counsel’s objection to the Court conducting any ex parte inquiry of Mr. Nauta.

In a fit of Trumpist projection, Woodward also complained that DOJ was doing things that might lead to tampering with witnesses.

2 In the time since the government’s submission, defense counsel has received several threatening and/or disparaging emails and phone calls. This is the result of the Special Counsel’s callous disregard for how their unnecessary actions affect and influence the public and the lives of the individuals involved in this matter. It defies credulity to suggest that it is coincidental that mere minutes after the government’s submission, at least one media outlet was reporting previously undisclosed details that were disclosed needlessly by the government.

Projection, projection, projection.

Well, it worked. Judge Cannon granted Woodward’s motion, even giving him one more day than he asked, until August 31 instead of August 30 (remember that she scheduled a sealed hearing sometime in this timeframe). Which will mean that because of actions taken and inaction by Aileen Cannon, Walt Nauta will go the entire month of August without getting a conflict review.

Meanwhile, on August 16, DOJ filed a motion for a Garcia hearing to discuss the three witnesses represented by Carlos De Oliveira’s attorney who may testify against him. Best as I can tell, Cannon is simply ignoring that one. Fuck De Oliveira, I guess.

After Cannon assented to yet more delay before she addressed the potentially conflicted representation of two of three defendants before her (someday, Cannon may even have to deal with conflicts Todd Blanche has, since he also represents Boris Epshteyn), DOJ submitted notice sharing a filing they submitted before the DC grand jury, assenting to Woodward’s request, filed just yesterday morning (that is, three days after their reply), asking to unseal stuff that was already unsealed.

It includes the Woodward filing, from which DOJ’s reply quoted, that Woodward claims DOJ cited out of context.

The full filing doesn’t help Woodward.

Indeed, Woodward’s own filing suggests that if Taveras wanted to cooperate with the government, that would entail seeking a new attorney.

Ultimately, this is little more than a last-ditch effort to pressure [Taveras] with vague (and likely nonexistent) criminal conduct in the hopes that [Taveras] will agree to become a witness cooperating with the government in other matters. See Government Filing, p. 10 (“A conflict may arise during an investigation if a lawyer’s ‘responsibility to his other clients prevents the lawyer from exploring with the prosecutor whether it might be in the interest of one witness to cooperate with the grand jury or to seek immunity if the witness’s cooperation or testimony would be detrimental to the lawyer’s other client.’ [] ‘Professional ethics prevent [an attorney] from advising a witness to seek immunity or leniency when the quid pro quo is testimony damning to his other clients, to whom he also owes a duty of undivided fidelity[.] [] In many cases, however, that advice is precisely what the client needs to hear, even, or perhaps especially, when it ‘is unwelcome’ advice that ‘the client, as a personal matter, does not want to hear or follow.’ [] (internal citations omitted)). Ultimately, [Taveras] has been advised by counsel that he may, at any time, seek new counsel, and that includes if he ultimately decided he wanted to cooperate with the government. However, [Taveras] has not signified any such desire and that means counsel for [Taveras] can continue to represent [Taveras] both diligently and competently. [my emphasis]

And the filing makes clear that DOJ addressed at more length the conflict presented because Woodward was being paid by Save America PAC; while I’m uncertain about the local rules in SDFL, in DC there is a specific rule 1.8(e), requiring informed consent when an attorney is paid by someone else. While Woodward addressed it (see below), Woodward’s own description that Taveras could get another lawyer if he wanted to cooperate would seem to conflict with that rule’s independence of representation, and when he addresses the rule, Woodward doesn’t address confidentiality.

Furthermore, when Woodward addresses why being paid by Save America PAC is only natural for Taveras because Taveras worked for Trump, he makes an argument that wouldn’t explain the entirety of his representation for Nauta — or, for that matter, Kash Patel, a known Woodward client who testified in the stolen documents case.

While the government has often sought to imply an illicit purpose for the Save America PAC covering the legal costs of certain grand jury witnesses, the truth has always been very simple and legitimate: many of the grand jury witnesses, including [Taveras], are only subject to this investigation by virtue of their employment with entities related to or owned by Donald Trump. Save America PAC has placed no conditions on the provision of legal services to their employees. Ultimately and in compliance with Rule 1.8, [Taveras] was advised that Save America PAC would pay his legal fees, that [Taveras] could pursue other counsel than Mr. Woodward if he so desired, that Save America PAC was not Mr. Woodward’s client, that [Taveras] was Mr. Woodward’s client, and that [Taveras] could always make the decisions relating to the trajectory of [Taveras]’s grand jury testimony. [my emphasis]

Taveras is only a witness because Trump paid him to do IT work. But for much of the conduct about which Kash must have given testimony, represented by Woodward, he was the Acting Chief of Staff at the Pentagon. That’s the period when, per Kash, Trump conducted a wild declassification spree in his last days as President before packing up boxes to move to Mar-a-Lago.

And while most of Nauta’s exposure as a witness (and now defendant) arises from things Nauta did as Trump’s valet after both left the White House, ¶25 of the superseding indictment, describing the process by which Trump and Nauta packed up to leave, entails conduct from before Nauta left government employ.

If Trump were to be charged with 18 USC 2071, Nauta would be a witness to that.

In other words, brushing off the financial conflict with Taveras is one thing, but this conflict is also about Nauta. And Nauta is now being prosecuted for conduct that may have begun when American taxpayers were paying him, not Donald Trump. One of the things Nauta may be hiding by not cooperating are details about Trump’s overt intentions as they both packed up boxes.

And that’s not even the most damning part of the filing DOJ submitted yesterday.

DOJ also submitted its initial motion to unseal grand jury materials, submitted on July 30, in advance of the Garcia motion.

That motion reveals, first of all, that DOJ informed Judge Cannon of the conflict hearing on June 27.

On June 27, 2023, the government filed a sealed motion asking the Court to conduct an inquiry into potential conflicts of interests arising from attorney Stanley Woodward, Jr.’s simultaneous representation of [Taveras] and Waltine Nauta (“conflicts hearing motion”); and a separate sealed motion seeking Court authorization to disclose the conflicts hearing motion by, among other things, attaching a copy of the motion to a sealed notice to be filed in United States v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, No. 23-cr-80101 (S.D. Fla.) (“Florida case”). The Court granted both motions, and the government filed the sealed notice, with a copy of the conflicts hearing motion attached, the same day.

As DOJ noted in its reply, that’s what the sealed docket entries 45 and 46 are.

That is, Aileen Cannon knew this was happening in real time. DOJ wasn’t hiding anything from her.

That motion to unseal also describes that DOJ intended to file “all information related to the conflicts hearing,” including the appointment of Michelle Peterson to represent Taveras, in a sealed supplement to its motion for a Garcia hearing.

The government therefore moves for an order permitting it to disclose to the court in the Florida case all information related to the conflicts hearing, including the fact and dates of the hearing, the resulting appointment of AFPD to represent [Taveras], and, if necessary, any filings, orders, or transcripts associated with the conflicts hearing. The government initially intends to include such information only in a sealed supplement to its motion for a Garcia hearing.

In other words, these two docket entries that Judge Cannon ordered be stricken, five days after they were posted and therefore made available to both Cannon and Woodward?

They include the material that, Woodward claims, he had never seen before DOJ’s reply.

Judge Cannon just gave Woodward another bite at the apple, as well as another six days before his client gets a Garcia hearing, based off Woodward’s claim that he had never seen information DOJ had shared (and which would have been available to Woodward for five days) but then Cannon herself had removed from the record. DOJ did provide this information in its initial motion. But because of actions Cannon took — the judicial equivalent of flushing that information down the toilet — Woodward (after waiting three days himself before first asking Judge Boasberg to share the information) claimed that he had never seen it before.

DOJ may have had a sense of where this was going, because back on July 30, in the same paragraph where they asked for permission to submit this information as part of a sealed supplement, DOJ also asked for permission to share it in unsealed form if things came to that.

[T]o ensure that it does not need to return to the Court for further disclosure orders, the government also seeks authorization to disclose information related to the conflicts hearing more broadly in the Florida case, as the need arises, including in briefing and in-court statements related to the Garcia hearing.

Things did, indeed, come to that.

And Woodward may have gotten notice of all that from Judge Boasberg’s order on July 31.

Things are going to get really testy going forward (if they haven’t already under seal) because, in a filing that DOJ did not first ask permission to file (but which I suspect would be authorized by a sealed order elsewhere in the docket, not to mention general ethical obligations requiring DOJ to inform her of everything going on in DC), DOJ just revealed that Judge Cannon threw out precisely the information that she’s now using to grant Woodward’s request for a sur-reply and — between the three days he waited to ask and the six she granted him to respond — nine more days to delay such time before Walt Nauta might be told about the significance of all the conflicted representation Woodward has taken on.

But I also expect that this will escalate quickly in one or another forum. Aileen Cannon was informed weeks ago of two significant conflicts in the representation of defendants before her, and rather than attend to those conflicts (or decide, simply, that she was going to blow them off, which in some forms might be an appealable decision), she has helped Woodward simply stall any resolution to the potential conflict.

Remember how I’ve promised I would start yelling if I believed that Cannon was doing something clearly problematic to help Trump? I’d say we’re there.

Update: Corrected my own math on the delay, which I said was 11 days but is 9. Ignoring that Cannon asked for lengthy briefing on a topic that most judges would just issue an order on, the key delays are:

  • 5 days before Cannon flushed the sealed supplement down the judicial toilet
  • 3 days between the DOJ reply and Woodward’s panicked demand for a sur-reply based on a claim that DOJ hadn’t previously raised the things Cannon flushed
  • 6 days of delay before Woodward will submit his sur-reply

Right Wing Operatives Say Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Get Same Treatment as Dmitry Firtash

/34 Comments/in , , , , /by

In the wake of the Politico and NYT reports on the collapse of the Hunter Biden plea deal (which I wrote up here), right wing operatives have a remarkable complaint: That the President’s son got worse treatment from DOJ than mobbed up Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash.

The complaint started with Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland (who called the good Politico piece and the problematic NYT piece “virtually identical”).

Margot complains that Hunter Biden’s lawyer Chris Clark attempted to reach out to high level DOJ personnel to raise concerns about the degree to which the investigation into his client had been politicized from the start.

Clark’s efforts to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco failed.

Ultimately, though, he did get a meeting with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer, who oversees ethical violations at DOJ. As Faceplant Margot helpfully lays out, the meeting happened in the wake of yet another attempt by agents involved in the case — after repeated leaks to the press — to  force Weiss’ hand.

According to Politico, from the fall of 2022 through the spring of 2023, Clark, on behalf of Hunter, sought meetings with high-level Justice Department officials, including the head of the Criminal Division, the head of the Tax Division, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of the Solicitor General, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and the attorney general himself. Clark finally succeeded in his efforts to meet with a higher-up at Main Justice, when on April 26, 2023, Clark met with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer and Delaware U.S. Attorney Weiss.

Just one week earlier, Mark Lytle, a partner at the law firm Nixon Peabody, had penned a letter to key House and Senate committees informing them that his client, a career IRS criminal supervisory special agent, sought to make “protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress,” concerning an investigation into a politically connected individual. Those whistleblower disclosures, the letter explained, would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” would show the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interests,” and would provide “examples of preferential treatment” and improper political influence. While the whistleblowers did not identify the politically connected taxpayer, Just The News confirmed the allegations concerned Hunter Biden.

So that means that after Hunter’s lawyer spent some six months trying to swing a meeting with top DOJ officials, a meeting materialized a week after news broke of the whistleblowers’ claims that political favoritism prevented them from properly investigating Hunter Biden.

Soon after Weiss, Hunter’s attorney Clark, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer met in late April 2023 to discuss the Hunter Biden investigation, the House Ways and Means Committee met on May 5, 2023, and received a “proffer” from the whistleblowers’ attorney concerning the testimony their client would provide Congress about the political interference into the Hunter Biden investigation.

Less than a week later, on May 11, 2023, Weinsheimer “thanked Clark for the meeting and told him Weiss would handle the next steps.” Then, on May 15, 2023, “at the request of the Department of Justice,” the two whistleblowers and their entire elite team of IRS investigators were removed from the Hunter Biden investigation. It was the same day, according to the Times’ weekend reporting, that Wolf proposed resolving the investigation into Hunter Biden with only a deferred prosecution agreement.

Margot leaves out a few details about what led up to the removal of the IRS investigators from the case. According to his own testimony, Gary Shapley had been sidelined months earlier, as he continued to resist requests from DOJ that he provide his emails pertaining to the case. According to Ziegler’s testimony, his related cases had already been put on hold.

Margot seeks to blame a meeting in April for things that IRS agents’ own behavior had triggered months (and in Shapley’s case, over a year) earlier.

After Faceplant Margot’s piece, one of Gary Shapley’s attorneys, Tristan Leavitt, got into it.

The thing is, Main DOJ grants audiences to the lawyers of high profile suspects fairly routinely. It’s one of the things you get when you hire a a lawyer of a certain stature.

On behalf of “Hunter Biden” “laptop” disseminator Steve Bannon, for example, “Hunter Biden” “laptop” disseminator Robert Costello met with JP Cooney and two other AUSAs twice in November 2022.

And in fact, as I pointed out in the beginning of an amusing exchange with Leavitt, someone directly tied to the politicized allegations against Hunter Biden availed himself of just that kind of access: Dmitry Firtash.

Unlike Hunter Biden, when Dmitry Firtash leveraged that kind of access, his attorneys — Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova  — were granted a meeting with the Attorney General, with Bill Barr, who may or may not have had a role in putting the investigation into Hunter Biden in Delaware in the first place.

In July, the tycoon changed legal teams, replacing longtime Democratic lawyer Lanny Davis with the husband-and-wife team of Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, who appear frequently on Fox News to defend Trump and have served as informal advisers to Trump’s legal team, including Giuliani.

After taking on Firtash’s case, Toensing and diGenova secured a rare face-to-face meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr and other Justice Department officials to argue against the charges, three people familiar with the meeting said.

Barr declined to intercede, the people said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the case “has the support of the department leadership,” adding: “We continue to work closely with the Austrian Ministry of Justice to extradite Mr. Firtash.”

Mind you, Toensing and DiGenova did not succeed in getting DOJ to drop the case against the mobbed up Ukrainian oligarch — though neither did Chris Clark’s meeting with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer succeed in getting David Weiss to drop the case against Hunter Biden.

After Firtash’s success at getting an audience with the Attorney General was disclosed, only Mitt Romney, of all the Republicans in Congress, voiced any problem with the larger corruption aired during Trump’s first impeachment, which included the means and purpose for which Toensing got that meeting. But Republicans now feign outrage that the American citizen targeted in that earlier access campaign might seek a similar meeting.

At least according to Lev Parnas, the Firtash meeting had a direct role in a campaign against Hunter Biden, a campaign that developed in parallel to the criminal investigation and which — at least since Leavitt’s client has gone public — has provably merged.

Rudy first reached out to Parnas in November 2018. Joseph Ziegler first attempted to open the investigation, based on payments to a sex worker network, in November 2018.

In January 2019, per Ziegler’s testimony, Delaware’s US Attorney’s Office first started looking into Hunter Biden. That same month, Rudy and Parnas met with Yuri Lutsenko in New York, where Rudy — who connected Trump in on the phone in the way Republicans falsely alleged Hunter connected his father in to weigh in on the substance of business deals — tried to trade access to Bill Barr in exchange for dirt on Hunter and $200K.

Giuliani continued to receive conspiracy theories from different sources, and remained insistent that there must be some data on the Bidens’ corruption. In late January 2019, my business partner Igor Fruman got word that Yuri Lutsenko, Shokin’s replacement as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, was in New York and wanted to meet with Giuliani to discuss some legal matters. We set up the meeting in Giuliani’s office on Park Avenue. There, Lutsenko explained he’d requested the meeting because he wanted to sit down with Bill Barr and, Attorney General to Attorney General, discuss the overall problem of Ukrainian and American corruption, including the funneling of Ukrainian money into American institutions. Giuliani stopped Lutsenko and said he wasn’t interested in that, only in information concerning Joe and Hunter Biden. He then added statements to the effect that if Lutsenko wanted a conversation with Barr, he would need to offer a give and take, and Giuliani was interested in details about the Bidens.

[snip]

During the meeting, Giuliani stopped to call President Trump for about 3-5 minutes to update him on how the meeting was going with Lutsenko, and told Lutsenko that Trump was very happy with the help he was giving. He gave Lutsenko the thumbs-up. Lutsenko then promised that if we went to Ukraine, he would help us meet President Poroshenko and other officials who were dealing directly with the Burisma investigation. After the first meeting, Lutsenko kept pressuring Giuliani that he needed to meet Bill Barr. However, Giuliani eventually told Lutsenko he hadn’t provided enough information, and that the only way he could meet Bill Barr was if he retained Giuliani for $200,000. He then gave Lutsenko a “contract”. (It should be noted that Lutsenko refused to pay and to this day has never met Bill Barr.)

A few days later, Giuliani told me that he had decided that it might not be a good look for him to represent Ukrainian officials while representing Donald Trump, and introduced me to attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, who he said would represent Lutsenko instead. Later on, Giuliani told me that Toensing and DiGenova had agreed to split the $200,000 retainer fee in some part with him.

In April 2019, Ziegler’s investigation and DE USAO’s investigations were consolidated.

The next month, Rudy’s efforts started to incorporate Firtash, with Toensing and DiGenova again serving as the public face of the effort, but with Rudy allegedly sharing in the spoils.

Near the end of our trip to Paris, we were introduced to one of Igor Fruman’s associates, a friend who happened to be an employee of a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash, who had many political and business connections, including with the head of Burisma, Zlochevsky. When we returned to the U.S., we met with the BLT Team and John Solomon said Firtash’s help would be key because of his relationship with Zlochevsky.

The problem was that Firtash would prove nearly impossible to contact. He was also facing a serious extradition case to the U.S. for a number of bribery, racketeering and other charges since 2014. Solomon and Giuliani put together a package of documents regarding confidential information in Firtash’s case, and had me travel to Vienna in June 2019 to meet with Firtash, letting him know that Giuliani and our whole team were serious and that we could help him if he helped us. From June until the time of my arrest in October 2019, we had ongoing communications with Firtash.

In October 2019 — per notes taken by Leavitt’s client — FBI received the first official outreach from John Paul Mac Isaac about a laptop that appears to have been packaged up, during a period when Hunter Biden’s digital life shows signs of being compromised, after Ziegler had opened the investigation. That happened just days after Rudy, Parnas, and John Solomon had planned to go to Vienna to obtain a different instance of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” a trip that was forestalled by Parnas’ arrest and Barr’s warnings to (at least) Fox News.

In the early part of October 2019, I got a call telling me to go to Vienna with Giuliani, where the former Chief Financial Officer of Burisma, Alexander Gorbunenko, would meet Giuliani and give us Hunter Biden’s hard drive and answer any questions we had. My Ukrainian contacts also told me they would have Viktor Shokin in Vienna to give an interview to Sean Hannity of FOX News, because Shokin was supposed to appear in a Viennese court on behalf of Dmitry Firtash, giving sworn testimony in court that would basically be saying what Giuliani wanted him to say – that he was fired because of Joe Biden. (As mentioned earlier, Biden did make statements that he had helped to get Shokin fired, but Ukrainian investigations into the matter some years later concluded that Shokin had been terminated because of multiple cases of corruption while in office.)

I have text messages confirming all these plans, and all are among the materials I submitted to Congress during the first impeachment inquiry. These include messages from Hannity setting up the interview, and messages coordinating that Giuliani, Toensing, and I would go to Vienna to meet Burisma’s ex-CFO Gorbunenko. Just before we were to fly to Austria, there was a meeting at FOX News in Washington, because Solomon was appearing that night on Hannity’s show and Giuliani was appearing on Laura Ingraham’s. The BLT Team got together in a FOX conference room and discussed how we would blow up the story once we got Hunter Biden’s hard drive in Vienna.

Right in the middle of these seeming lockstep parallel investigations of Hunter Biden — by Bill Barr’s DOJ and by the then President’s lawyer all over Europe, and before offers of two laptops — both with ties to Rudy Giuliani — were made, two things happened.

On July 25, 2019, then President Donald Trump got on the phone with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and — after making a quid pro quo tying aid to the announcement of an investigation into Burisma — told Ukraine’s president that both Rudy and Barr would reach out.

I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.

[snip]

I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call.

The next month, in August, Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova succeeded in scoring the meeting Firtash wanted with the Attorney General. The Rudy investigation and the Barr investigation met first at Trump’s hotel and then at DOJ. And the day after IRS got a warrant to access the Hunter Biden laptop seemingly packaged up after Joseph Ziegler was already investigating, DOJ told Barr they were sending him a laptop.

Whether or not that Dmitry Firtash meeting was an explicit meeting of the Rudy and the DOJ investigations, whether or not that laptop Barr obtained was the same one Rudy had a role in packaging up, we do know the investigations have since merged.

After the first press blitz about Gary Shapley — arranged in significant part by Tristan Leavitt — Bill Barr raised attention to an FD-1023 obtained via a channel he set up to ensure that Rudy could share information obtained from known Russian spies without being prosecuted for soliciting known Russian spies. In response, Shapley and Ziegler both complained that they hadn’t had access to an informant report the sole operative detail of which involved a 2019 call set up with Mykola Zlochevsky during impeachment, in which he used those politicized discussions to reverse his earlier admissions in order to claim to have made a bribe to Joe Biden. Remarkably, Shapley — lawyered by people with close ties to Chuck Grassley, who released the FD-1023 — claims to have known about the tainted Pittsburgh evidence in real time.

That is, even three years later (or perhaps, especially three years later) the IRS agents who should have seen Hunter Biden’s digital life get attacked if not packaged up for their own consumption are complaining they’re not able to pursue leads obtained via a channel catering to Russian spies.

It’s not surprising that you could look at this timeline and still have right wingers claim that Hunter Biden is the one who got favorable treatment. Those people don’t care if they reveal their cynical hypocrisy in pursuit of attacks on democracy.

What is surprising is that people claiming to be journalists wouldn’t immediately lay out how absurd that is. The “democracy dies in darkness” guys sitting on their own evidence about this stuff have assigned upwards six journalists to cover this story, but few have shown any curiosity about how the known political hit job on Hunter Biden ties to the wails of the sources whose own stories they don’t bother to test.

It is the collective stance of the entire Republican party, save Mitt Romney, that it’s fine for Dmitry Firtash to score a meeting with the Attorney General as part of an alleged quid pro quo to get an investigation into Hunter Biden, but it’s a sign of corruption for Hunter’s lawyers to point out that happened to DOJ.

The Republican party claims it is a sign of corruption to call out their own corruption.

And virtually every Hill journalist is playing along.

The Guts of the Alleged Conspiracy: Scott Hall

/139 Comments/in , , /by

Much of the attention on Georgia’s processing of Trump’s co-conspirators in advance of the former President’s glorious fourth arrest on Thursday has been focused on the high profile perps: John Eastman turned himself in and issued a statement repeating his conspiracy theories, all so he could return in timely fashion to California for further disbarment hearings. Fani Willis informed Mark Meadows’ lawyers, “Your client is no different than any other criminal defendant in this jurisdiction.” Jeffrey Clark based his request for an emergency stay of his self-reporting in Fulton County on the risk that, “Mr. Clark [would be] required to book a flight to Georgia under such extreme time pressure.”

Another charged co-conspirator turned himself in yesterday as well, one whose role continues to be understated: Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman.

In the indictment, Hall is charged just in the RICO charge and the Coffee County tabulator conspiracies.

But he allegedly played a much more sustained role in the conspiracy, including in one way that has escaped much notice.

David Bossie’s brother-in-law’s conspiracies about the Georgia vote count

As Anna Bower describes in a superb chronicle of the Coffee County plot, after an initial hearing in Georgia, Hall reached out to Lin Wood with allegations of impropriety.

Hall, like Latham, believed that something nefarious had gone on in Georgia during the election. On Nov. 17, as Trump’s legal team prepared litigation in Georgia, Hall and his wife, Robin, reached out to [Lin] Wood, claiming that they had “proof” of voter fraud in Fulton County. “We watched them count boxes of mail-in votes that were 100% Biden and 0% Trump,” Robin wrote in an email to Wood obtained by Lawfare.

On the same day, an attorney named Carlos Silva sent an email to Wood and other lawyers working on Georgia election matters. “Just had a long conversation with Scott Hall,” Silva wrote in an email obtained by Lawfare. “He seems very knowledgeable when it comes to algorithms and other material information that he has on the Dominion voting system that was used in this election. He also has personal knowledge of the fraud that took place and is providing an affidavit.” In another email obtained by Lawfare, Silva wrote to Wood and others that he intended to meet Hall the next morning at the office of Ray Smith, an attorney also charged in the indictment for alleged crimes related to statements he made at Georgia legislative hearings.

Later that evening, Hall’s affidavit was filed as a part of a suit, Wood v. Raffensperger, which sought to halt certification of the presidential election in Georgia. In his sworn statement, Hall alleged that he had personally observed ballots that “appeared to be pre-printed with the selections already made.” “Hundreds of ballots at a time were counted for Biden only,” he wrote.

On November 20, then Georgia GOP Chair and now charged co-conspirator, David Shafer, asked Trump campaign worker Robert Sinners (known to be cooperating in investigations and described as co-conspirator 4 in the indictment) to help Hall chase down the names of absentee voters.

Scott Hall has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie.

David Bossie, of course, helped Trump win the 2016 election and has all sorts of ties to Republican rat-fuckery. Hall is reportedly Bossie’s brother-in-law.

Scott Hall ties Jeffrey Clark to Georgia

By January 2, Hall was coordinating with Jeffrey Clark. They spoke for over an hour on January 2.

On or about the 2nd day of January 2021, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, a Georgia bail bondsman, placed a telephone call to JEFFREY BOSSERT CLARK and discussed the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia. The telephone call was 63 minutes in duration.

By order in the indictment, this call precedes Clark’s renewed effort to get his superiors at DOJ to write a letter to Georgia about “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia,” suggesting that Hall’s allegations were one thing that triggered renewed pressure on Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, which would lead in turn to the confrontation at the White House on January 3.

Today at 3PM, Fani Willis will have to respond in both the Meadows and Clark motions for removal, to explain why both men should have to come to Georgia and turn themselves in before their efforts to remove the proceedings. One challenge Clark has already raised is that he doesn’t have enough ties to Georgia to be prosecuted there.

Mr. Clark also possesses a substantial defense based on insufficient contacts with the State of Georgia to permit the assertion of personal jurisdiction over him under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We reserve that defense, however, for presentation by separate motion at the appropriate time.

Indeed, one reason he doesn’t want to turn himself in is to prevent Willis from “making the argument that he has voluntarily accepted that he is subject to the criminal jurisdiction of Fulton County, which Mr. Clark decidedly does not accept).”

Like Meadows’ bid, Clark’s bid to remove his prosecution is not frivolous, particularly given that (unlike Meadows) he is not alleged to have gone to Georgia during this period. Both Jack Smith and Fani Willis will have a challenge explaining why efforts Clark made on Trump’s orders were not part of his job, explaining why Trump’s choice to bypass DOJ contact guidelines to leverage Clark against his superiors at DOJ is proof of a conspiracy rather than just executive prerogative.

So this call with Hall, the content of which Willis may not know, could be a key part of proving jurisdiction over Clark.

The call between Clark and Hall also precedes, at least by order in the indictment, Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger the same day.

David Bossie’s brother-in-law coordinates with the pressure campaign on Ruby Freeman

The part of the Georgia indictment that has largely escaped notice, however, is that Scott Hall also had a tie to the pressure campaign on Ruby Freeman.

You’ll recall there were several attempts to pressure Freeman into lying about fraud in Fulton County. In the first, minister Stephen Lee, traveled to her home on both December 14 and 15, in the guise of helping her, in an attempt to get her to admit to fraud that didn’t occur. Those efforts are charged as counts 20 and 21 of the indictment.

Lee coordinated on a second effort with Black Voices for Trump operative Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti, Kanye’s former publicist. Kutti met with Freeman, again feigning an attempt to protect her, and allegedly tried to get her to confess to fraud. Those efforts are charged as counts 30 and 31 of the indictment.

As described in the RICO conspiracy, that second effort started shortly after Lee’s first failed attempt, when he recruited Floyd, believing a Black man could win the trust of Freeman. On January 3, Floyd makes ten calls or texts, including several failed efforts to speak to Freeman. One of those calls is to unindicted co-conspirator 23, who may be the sole witness to the topic of these contacts.

The next day, Kutti traveled to Atlanta, reached out to Freeman, and ultimately met with her for an hour in a Cobb County police station (with Floyd calling in on the phone), offering her protection but still attempting to get her to confess to fraud.

According to public reports, Kutti told Freeman that people would come to her home in 48 hours if she didn’t confess.

According to the indictment, Ms Freeman met the publicist at a Cobb County Police Department precinct on 4 January 2021.

During the meeting, Ms Kutti allegedly asked Ms Freeman to confess to voter fraud and told her she was “in danger”.

Ms Kutti allegedly also warned people would come to Ms Freeman’s home in 48 hours if she didn’t confess.

On that day, Floyd seemingly reports in about all this to Shafer, the GOP Chair, at 8:10PM.

The day after Floyd seemingly checks in with Shafer, Robert Cheeley — a Georgia lawyer charged in the conspiracy count and on Trump’s side of the fake electors plot (Shafer is charged on the Georgia side) and Hall get involved with the Ruby Freeman plotters.

Act 127 of the RICO charge describes the following calls that it suggests (presumably based off testimony from CC23) are all connected:

  • 11:32AM: Lee calls Kutti
  • 12:14PM: The three Ruby Freeman plotters have a four-way call with CC23
  • 12:19PM: Hall calls Cheeley
  • 12:34PM: Hall calls Cheeley
  • 1:07PM: Cheeley calls Hall
  • 1:09PM: Cheeley calls Hall
  • 2:30PM: Cheeley calls Floyd
  • 2:45PM: Floyd calls Cheeley
  • 3:59PM: Cheeley calls Hall
  • 4:42PM: Lee calls Cheeley
  • 4:50PM: Lee calls Floyd
  • 5:05PM: Lee calls Floyd
  • 7:19PM: Kutti calls Cheeley
  • 7:48PM: Cheeley calls Kutti
  • 8:27PM: Cheeley calls Kutti
  • 8:49PM: Cheeley calls Lee
  • 9:18PM: Hall calls Cheeley
  • 9:31PM: Kutti calls Cheeley
  • 10:14PM: Cheeley calls Lee
  • 11:16PM: Cheeley calls Kutti
  • 11:25PM: Hall calls Cheeley
  • 11:35PM: Cheeley, Kutti, and Hall have a call
  • 12:09AM: Kutti calls Cheeley

On January 4, Kutti allegedly told Freeman that people would be coming to her house in 48 hours if she didn’t confess to fraud (that didn’t occur).

Then, for over 12 hours on January 5, extending past the period when, in DC, Trump was riling up his mob and targeting Pence, Cheeley, Hall, and the charged Ruby Freeman conspirators exchange a series of over twenty calls.

Less than a day later, as Bowers lays out, Hall was focusing his attention on obtaining the code from the Coffee County election hardware.

At 4:17 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, the president of the United States belatedly tweeted out his video message to the mob that had forcibly disrupted the counting of electoral votes. “You have to go home now,” he finally said.

But even as Giuliani was keeping up pressure on senators to “slow it down,” Coffee County officials were undeterred.

Nine minutes after the president’s tweet, at 4:26 p.m. that afternoon, Hampton sent a text to Chaney: “Scott Hall is on the phone with Cathy about wanting to come scan our ballots from the general election like we talked about the other day,” she wrote.

The next morning, on Jan. 7, Latham texted Hampton to tell her that the SullivanStrickler forensics team had departed Atlanta and were on their way to Coffee County. Hall, she added, was flying in, too. “Yay!!!!” Hampton responded. These events are also mentioned in Acts 142-143 of Count 1 of the Fulton County indictment.

The Ruby Freeman pressure campaign has often been described as a separate track of the RICO conspiracy — first the fake electors, then the effort to dupe Freeman into confessing to fraud, and finally the effort to seize the Dominion data. But between Shafer, Cheeley, and Hall, they all overlap on those series of calls on January 4 and 5, with Shafer and Cheeley playing central roles in the fake elector plot and Hall playing a central role in the Coffee County plot.

So while we’re all awaiting the next mugshot of a high profile charged co-conspirator, the key to understanding how all these strands fit together may lie with the lower profile Georgia bail bondsman, released yesterday on bail himself.

I, Too, Got Hoodwinked by Donald Trump’s Demands to Be Tried Like a Seditionist

/60 Comments/in /by

I’m about to write a post about what, per the DOJ, the discovery in Trump January 6 case is like.

But first, I have to confess.

When I read Trump’s own pitch for a trial in 2026, I missed one of his more clever deceits. It’s this one:

Indeed, the median time from commencement to termination for a jury-tried § 371 charge is 29.4 months—many times longer than the government’s proposal schedule. 12 (And this reflects only the median, meaning half of all such cases take more time based on individualized assessments of discovery volume, complexity, and similar concerns.)

12 Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Table D-10: U.S. District Courts–Median Time Intervals From Commencement to Termination for Criminal Defendants Disposed of, by Offense, During the 12-Month Period Ending September 30, 2022, at 2, jb_d10_0930.2022.pdf (uscourts.gov). [my emphasis]

To be sure, I should have been alerted to the deceit by this paragraph, in the same section.

Likewise, this Court regularly allows far more time than the government proposes, even in cases involving protests at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. See, e.g., United States v. Foy, No. 21- cr-0108 (28 months from indictment to stipulated bench trial on 4-page indictment); United States v. Nordean, et al, No. 21-cr-0175 (TJK) (21 months); United States v. Crowl, et al, No. 21-cr-0028 (APM) (23 months); United States v. Kuehne, et al, Case No. 21-cr-160 (29 months); United States v. Hostetter, et al, Case No. 21-cr-0392 (RCL) (24 months). [my emphasis]

Trump was calling now-convicted seditionists — and other militia members accused of attacking our democracy — “protestors”!!!!

My only excuse is that I read it in the middle of the night and figured I’d deal with it–as I intend to–once the government replied, which they now have.

One reason I’m so angry that I didn’t see this particular lie, though, is because I’ve pointed out what a blindspot this is among TV lawyers and insipid NYT columnists who like to blather about the investigation taking too long.

Everything got held up by COVID, not just the January 6 investigation. The first felony trial for Jan6ers was delayed until March 2022, partly because of COVID backlogs, and partly because of discovery challenges.

Only after that did Trump stall everything with frivolous Executive Privilege claims in the wake of SCOTUS upholding Judge Chutkan’s own ruling on the topic (another complaint Trump raised in his motion almost no one called out).

It turns out, as DOJ explained in a filing today, that Donald Trump was using the delays in the January 6 investigation necessitated by COVID to claim he shouldn’t be tried for January 6 until he gets a shot at being President again.

The defendant’s references to Section 371 statistics and January 6th cases overlook important underlying facts and context. See ECF No. 30 at 12. First, the defendant cites the median time from commencement to termination for jury trials of Section 371 charges—29.4 months—without explaining that this median time runs through the completion of sentencing, not the beginning of trial. That means that it includes the time required for jury selection, trial, verdict, and several months (or more) afterward before sentencing and final judgment. See https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/data_tables/jb_d10_0930.2022.pdf. The question here is when it is appropriate to start trial in this case, and statistics regarding the length of time from indictment to sentencing in other Section 371 cases have no bearing on that decision

Second, the data cited by the defendant spans October 2021 through September 2022, when federal courts were pulling out of a backlog caused by COVID-19 closures. During that period, only 22 cases went to trial nationwide. This small and skewed sample provides no help to the Court in deciding an appropriate trial date.

The defendant’s listed January 6th cases also omit important details and context. He fails to mention, for instance, that in one case he cites, disposition was delayed because of, among other reasons, litigation over pre-trial detention, a superseding indictment, and plea negotiations. See United States v. Foy, 21-cr-108, ECF No. 55, Superseding Indictment (11/10/21); 2/7/22 Minute Entry (setting jury trial for 9/19/22); ECF No. 67, Defendant’s Unopposed Motion to Vacate Trial Date (for, among other reasons, plea negotiations). All of the defendant’s other cited cases included multiple co-defendants—as many as seventeen. See United States v. Crowl, et al., 21- cr-28 at ECF No. 328, Fifth Superseding Indictment. The Court should set these inapposite comparisons aside when weighing the individual factors here under the Speedy Trial Act.

Trump was cherry picking data skewed by the catastrophe that might have been mitigated had his own COVID response been less irresponsible. He was cherry picking from among the other January 6 defendants (some adjudged seditionists), some of whose trials established precedents for his own.

Donald Trump argued that his trial, all by himself, should take as long as the Proud Boy leaders and other charged militia defendants, even without the COVID delays. He’s demanding that his trial take as long as it could if Jack Smith chose to try him for the whole kit and kaboodle, in which he might be guilty, but of which he is not yet charged.

And I fell for it.

On Visibility and [dis]Covering Kenneth Chesebro

/61 Comments/in , , /by

Yesterday, CNN reported that Kenneth Chesebro, identified as co-conspirator 5 in Trump’s DC indictment and charged in the Georgia one, in both indictments for actions limited to the fake electors scheme, trailed Alex Jones while he was present at the Capitol on January 6, apparently recording Jones’ actions and words for most of the time he’s at the Capitol.

CNN cites Ryan Goodman — who has steadfastly refused to look closely at much of the crime scene video evidence (much less credit the investigators who have meticulously catalogued it) — making a nonsense legal argument about the significance of Chesebro’s actions, one that clings to a cognitive distance between the white collar planning, to which he assigns Chesebro, and the blue collar execution of the attack).

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who previously served as the special counsel to the general counsel at the Department of Defense, told CNN that Chesebro’s presence on the Capitol grounds could be cited by prosecutors.

“Regardless of Chesebro’s potential criminal liability for being in the restricted areas of Capitol grounds, this evidence could be cited by prosecutors as further proof that Chesebro was not operating as a bona fide legal advisor but rather was an activist aligned in the cause to overturn the election,” Goodman said. “It undercuts defenses Chesebro might mount that he was functioning only in the role of providing legal advice for clients.”

The NYT version of the same story makes an equally nonsensical observation about what it means, claiming that this is the first evidence that “different tentacles of the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power [] overlapped.”

Until now, there appeared to be different tentacles of the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power that had not overlapped. But Mr. Chesebro hinted at those connections in an email exchange with John Eastman, another lawyer who was instrumental in the plan to pressure Mr. Pence with the fake elector scheme.

In late December 2020, the two lawyers discussed how to get a case before the Supreme Court. Mr. Chesebro told Mr. Eastman as they discussed filing a legal action that in terms of the highest court, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

The pressure on state legislators brought to bear by Stop the Steal, ginned up at rallies headlined by Jones and Alexander, has always been a necessary component of the fake electors plan. The Georgians charged in the Trump side of the fake elector charges in the Georgia indictment, Robert Cheeley and Scott Hall, were also coordinating with the people pressuring Ruby Freeman. The political violence was not an afterthought, it was part of the plan.

Indeed, Thomas Joscelyn, a key author of the January 6 Report, noted that this overlap is in no way new and reminded that Jones and Owen Shroyer were in contact with the Proud Boys who are awaiting sentencing on their sedition conviction.

There is no firm dividing line between those orchestrating the political conspiracy to overturn the election and the extremists who led the attack on the Capitol.

He cited back to the passage of the report describing that Jones’ entourage was in direct contact, in real time, with the Proud Boys, even as they kicked off the riot.

Other, more prominent members of the Proud Boys appear to have been in contact with Jones and Shroyer about the events of January 6th and on that day. Records for Enrique Tarrio’s phone show that while the attack on the Capitol was ongoing, he texted with Jones three times and Shroyer five times.124 Ethan Nordean’s phone records reflect that he exchanged 23 text messages with Shroyer between January 4th and 5th, and that he had one call with him on each of those days.125 Records of Joseph Biggs’s communications show that he texted with Shroyer eight times on January 4th and called him at approximately 11:15 a.m. on January 6th, while Biggs and his fellow Proud Boys were marching at and around the Capitol.126

Those ties have remained close. Indeed, Jones and Shroyer — who were asked to lead Trump’s mob to the Capitol by someone in Trump’s immediate vicinity — have shared a lawyer, Norm Pattis, with former InfoWars employee and seditionist Joe Biggs for over a year; Pattis has also even taken over the defense of Zach Rehl.

But the limited visibility J6C had on that key node, the Jones entourage (largely because of their obstruction), ultimately prevented it from connecting all the dots and indeed the full extent of those dots remains obscure.

Even before you add Chesebro to the equation, in that entourage you had Jones who understood he was sent to lead the mob by Trump himself (J6C concludes it must have been conveyed through Caroline Wren, though for reasons I included in this post, that’s not entirely convincing). You had Shroyer, who shared that understanding, and who was coordinating with those launching the attack. And in addition to his frequent updates from Wren and coordination with Garrett Ziegler (now a central player in the Hunter Biden information operation led by Rudy Giuliani), Ali Alexander was also coordinating closely with Paul Gosar’s office — the guy who’d kick off the challenges. And all of them have exceptionally close ties to Roger Stone, including membership in the Friends of Stone list.

And, as CapitolHunters reminded in response to this coverage — and backed with a new researcher-compiled video of Jones’ movements that day — Jones played an absolutely central role in the success of the attack, first by bringing reinforcements to those leading the attack, and then, once he got there, by leading a huge chunk of those mobsters to the East side of the Capitol, where they’d serve a crucial role in a second, pincer attack on the building.

The convergence of first Jones and then key members of two militias on the East doors is the easiest place to see that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t random, but — at least in key movements — was fairly well executed. That convergence — and collection of evidence showing the import of Jones’ actions, for which people have already done time — has been an investigative focus from the start.

And Chesebro was there, capturing Jones’ actions.

Jones is a blowhorn-wielding asshole. But he commands almost the same kind of rabid loyalty as Trump does (Alexander estimated that a third of the attendees that day were Jones’ people). And via whatever means (the new Jones compilation video makes me wonder about potential uneven understanding of the events of the day, between Jones, Alexander, and Jones’ handlers) Jones played a central role in events of the day.

That entourage was a bunch of men checking in with at least Wren and possibly Ziegler, with Gosar’s office, and with the Proud Boys as they launched the attack on the Capitol. That entourage led a mob from the Ellipse, and then wittingly or not, deployed the mob where they would be the most effective, right there on the East steps before a second major breach would occur.

That’s the background one should bring to the images showing Chesebro, someone always associated with the plotting in the Willard, filming Jones as that entourage moved around the Capitol.

It’s not clear who sent him or why. NYT quotes a Jones lawyer — probably the same lawyer that Jones, Shroyer, Biggs, and Rehl share, Norm Pattis — disclaiming any knowledge of why Chesebro was shadowing Jones that day (though, given Jones’ paranoia and Shroyer’s pending sentencing, I’d find the denial more credible if Jones were squawking about being spied on by the Deep State).

It remains unclear why Mr. Chesebro was with Mr. Jones’s group outside the Capitol or how he came to be with them. A lawyer for Mr. Jones said that Mr. Jones was unaware that Mr. Chesebro had been following his entourage that day.

Plus, at one point, Chesebro seems to share something on his phone with a member of Jones’ security.

It is clear that Chesebro is not participating in the riot. Chesebro never indulges in the kind of fan worship of Jones as everyone else following him around does. Nor does he ever get distracted by the far more significant spectacle happening just yards away. He appears to be, at a minimum, monitoring Jones (though CapitolHunters pointed to some mannerisms that could be the kind of signaling as other things seen in the crime scene footage). And when Jones leaves, Chesebro follows. Chesebro continues to monitor — and film — as Jones seeds a conspiracy theory about the attack being launched by provocateurs on his way out (Michael Coudrey is a key Alexander associate, another member of the entourage).

We have seen that members of both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers monitored the proceedings of the attack remotely, with Proud Boy leaders — including Tarrio and Bertino — chiming into the command and control from afar. It may be that’s what we’re seeing here.

After thirty months of hypervisibility, it’s easy to forget that there were actually pockets of the attack (inside offices without surveillance cameras and under the scaffolding are two of them) that could only be rendered visible by the cameras of others onsite, making their own recording. There are parts of Jones’ movement — which his own entourage recorded with a GoPro and at least one phone — that he subsequently edited.

The actions of Ken Chesebro suggest that someone wanted to make sure Jones’ movements at the Capitol would be visible, possibly to people monitoring the attack remotely, perhaps even in real time. Indeed, given that we’ve never seen this footage published on Parler, it suggests someone wanted a record of Jones’ real-time movement for private consumption.

The two indictments implicating Ken Chesebro have brought new visibility to him, and his actions. The discovery of Chesebro monitoring Jones’ activities during the attack have made aspects of the coordination behind this attack visible to TV lawyers for the first time. But amid all that newfound visibility, it’s worth remembering that some people knew to — and did — monitor all this in real time.

Update: I may have overstated when I claimed that Chesebro hadn’t cheered Jones. At the very beginning of this clip, Chesebro (in the far left of the frame) yells out, “Alex Jones” with the rest inaudible to me.

The Challenge of Treating the Proud Boy Leaders as Terrorists

/55 Comments/in , , /by

The omnibus sentencing memo for the Proud Boy Leaders — an 80-page document supplemented by another 15 pages for each — describes their crime this way:

The defendants organized and directed a force of nearly 200 to attack the heart of our democracy.

[snip]

None of this was mere happenstance or accident. In the months leading up to January 6, 2021, they had brought their army of violence to Portland, Kalamazoo, and Washington, D.C. And then they brought that army of violence to the Capitol to exert their political will. In doing so, these defendants attempted to silence millions of Americans who had placed their vote for a different candidate, to ignore the variety of legal and judicial mechanisms that lawfully scrutinized the electoral process leading up to and on January 6, and to shatter the democratic system of governance enshrined in our laws and in our Constitution.

For years, these defendants intentionally positioned themselves at the vanguard of political violence in this country. They brought that violence to the Capitol on January 6 in an effort to change the course of American history, and the sentences imposed by this Court should reflect the seriousness of their offenses.

[snip]

The justice system’s response to January 6 will impact whether January 6 becomes an outlier or a watershed moment. “By nearly every measure, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was five years ago.” Adrienne LaFrance, The New Anarchy: America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop, THE ATLANTIC, Mar. 6, 2023 (citing a 2022 UC Davis poll31 that found one in five Americans believes political violence would be “at least sometimes” justified, and one in 10 believes it would be justified if it meant the return of President Trump). Left unchecked, this impulse threatens our democracy.

The defendants in this case sought to capitalize on this undercurrent in our society to change the result of a presidential election. They called for using force, intimidation, and violence to get political leaders to stop the certification of the election. They recruited others to this mission. They organized and participated in encrypted messaging groups and meetings to further their plans. Such conduct in leading and instigating an attack like January 6 demands deterrence. It is critical that this Court impose significant sentences of incarceration on all the defendants in this case to convey to those who would mobilize such political violence in the future that their actions will have consequences.

That language is a succinct statement of the terrorism committed by the Proud Boys.

But the document as a whole is a testament to how the asymmetrical treatment of terrorism in the United States makes it much harder to hold men like Enrique Tarrio and Joe Biggs accountable for attacking the Capitol that it would be if they were Islamic terrorists, rather than right wing Trump supporters.

The reason why the government had to dedicate 80 pages to justify sentences of 30 years for the core leaders of the January 6 attack is because it requires massaging the sentencing guidelines to treat white (or Afro-Cuban, as Tarrio identifies as) person terrorism like the US has long treated Islamic terrorism.

Here’s what DOJ had to in order to justify calling for these sentences:

  • Ask for consecutive sentences, effectively stacking some sentences on others
  • Adopt the treason sentencing guideline for sedition (which doesn’t otherwise have one), even while the maximum sentence for sedition is just 20 years
  • Ask that Judge Tim Kelly use the conspiracy convictions to apply the conduct of each defendant against the other, to apply the assault and property damage done by Pezzola against the others and the sedition conviction against Pezzola
  • Use enhancements for property destruction, substantial interference in the vote certification, and extensive planning on the obstruction charges
  • Use leadership or management enhancements for everyone but Pezzola
  • Ask for additional departures from the guidelines for “conduct [that] resulted in a significant disruption of a governmental function” and an “intent to frighten, intimidate, and coerce” federal lawmakers
  • Dismiss challenges (led by Nordean attorney Nick Smith over two years) to the treatment of the vote certification as an official proceeding that can be obstructed
  • Ask for a terrorism enhancement for the destruction of property (tied to the window Pezzola broke and some bicycle racks)
  • Ask for terrorism enhancement based on the clear political intent of all these crimes, including sedition, which is explicitly political
  • Add enhancements for Biggs, Tarrio, and Rehl for obstructing the investigation or trial (which is why Nordean’s proposed sentence is lower than the other guys’)
  • Describe the Oath Keeper as late-comers to sedition, by comparison
  • Laugh at any claim these men accepted responsibility for their crimes

The sentences make sense — particularly when you compare the damage these terrorists did against the aspirational Islamic terrorists who have been sentenced to even longer sentences. But in the scope of the sentencing guidelines as they exist, it all comes off as funny math.

Update: I probably should have explained in the post why this happens. Because domestic terrorism is not a crime unto itself, but instead an enhancement (which is the way it is being used with the destruction of property here), it is not finally used as a label until sentencing. Prosecutors have, in fact, been calling the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys terrorists throughout their prosecution in detention memos (relying on the same destruction of property). I addressed this in this post and this one.

Update: Here’s a post I wrote in 2015 about this asymmetry.

Note: The image accompanying this post is a challenge coin for January 6 introduced as an exhibit in Christoper Worrel (who has skipped bail as he awaits sentencing). The Proud Boys literally made the attack on the Capitol into a coin of their terrorist group. Update: Added the image to the body of the post, too, bc I confused people by referencing it w/o including it. 

Death by Tweet: “User Attribution Is Important”

/102 Comments/in , , /by

Donald Trump nearly killed his Vice President by tweet — the tweet he sent at 2:24PM on January 6, 2021.

111. At 2:24 p.m., after advisors had left the Defendant alone in his dining room, the Defendant issued a Tweet intended to further delay and obstruct the certification: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

112. One minute later, at 2:25 p.m., the United States Secret Service was forced to evacuate the Vice President to a secure location.

113. At the Capitol, throughout the afternoon, members of the crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”; “Where is Pence? Bring him out!”; and “Traitor Pence!”

114. The Defendant repeatedly refused to approve a message directing rioters to leave the Capitol, as urged by his most senior advisors-including the White House Counsel, a Deputy White House Counsel, the Chief of Staff, a Deputy Chief of Staff, and a Senior Advisor.

As the indictment tells it, at the time Trump sent his potentially lethal tweet, inciting the mob bearing down on Mike Pence, Pence’s spouse, and daughter, Donald Trump was alone in his dining room with the murder weapon: an unknown phone, and his Twitter account.

But when DOJ served a warrant on Twitter for Trump’s Twitter account on January 17, they couldn’t be sure who was holding the murder weapon. They also wouldn’t know whether triggering the murder weapon was coordinated with other events.

That explains why, as Thomas Windom described in a February 9 hearing, metadata from Trump’s Twitter account showing any other account associated with his own may have been just as important for the investigation as any DMs obtained with the warrant.

MR. HOLTZBLATT: Well, Your Honor, we don’t — the issue, Your Honor — there isn’t a category of “associated account information”; that’s not information that Twitter stores.

What we are doing right now is manually attempting to ascertain links between accounts. But the ascertainment of links between accounts on the basis of machine, cookie, IP address, email address, or other account or device identifier is not information that Twitter possesses, it would be information that Twitter needs to create. So that’s the reason why we had not previously produced it because it’s not a category of information that we actually possess.

[snip]

MR. WINDOM: It is, as explained more fully in the warrant — but for these purposes, it is a useful tool in identifying what other accounts are being used by the same user or by the same device that has access to the account is oftentimes in any number of cases, user attribution is important. And if there are other accounts that a user is using, that is very important to the government’s investigation.

[snip]

MR. HOLTZBLATT: That’s right. If the records — if the linkage between accounts, which is what we understand this category to be referring to, is not itself a piece of information that we keep, then it’s not a business record that we would ordinarily produce.

What I understand the government to be asking is for us to analyze our data, as opposed to produce existing data. And we are trying to work with the government in that respect, but that is the reason that it is not something that — that is a different category of information. [my emphasis]

By that point, DOJ would have had Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony describing what she saw sitting outside Trump’s dining room door (and once, going in to pass off Mark Meadows’ phone). They would have had two grand jury appearances from the two Pats, Cipollone and Philbin, the White House Counsel and Deputy Counsel described in the passage. They would have had at least one interview with Eric Herschmann — the Senior Advisor trying to calm him down.

They did not yet have privilege waived testimony from the Chief of Staff — Mark Meadows — or the Deputy Chief of Staff — Dan Scavino.

And Dan Scavino was the most likely other person to know about that near murder by tweet, because Dan Scavino was in his position, the Deputy Chief of Staff, first and foremost because he had masterminded Trump’s own mastery of Twitter going back to 2016.

So one thing DOJ needed to know before they conducted an interview that took place after Beryl Howell rejected yet another frivolous Executive Privilege claim in March was how Dan Scavino accessed Trump’s Twitter account when he did, from what device.

Who else had access to Trump’s Twitter account, one part of the murder weapon?

When DOJ asked Twitter to go back and figure out which other accounts shared IP addresses, cookies, or other device identifier with Trump’s Twitter account, they were asking for a list of other people (or at least clues to identify those people) who might be holding that murder weapon on January 6, Trump’s Twitter account, instead of Donald Trump.

Before Dan Scavino told the grand jury that he wasn’t in the room when that tweet was sent, as he must have, DOJ would have needed a better idea whether Scavino sent the tweet, to know whether he was telling the truth once he did sit for a privilege waived interview.

But they were also asking for a very specific clue about the other part of that murder weapon: some way to identify the phone from which the potentially deadly tweet was sent. Identifying which phone was alone in the room with Donald Trump on January 6 would also identify which phone to go seize to learn who else Trump was communicating with when he was sitting alone in his dining room as he watched his supporters assault the Capitol. Identifying which phone was alone in the room with Donald Trump on January 6 would help to fill the gap in communications that the January 6 Committee never completely filled.

And not just that phone.

Obtaining the associations to Trump’s Twitter account would also help explain one of the most enduring mysteries about January 6: What happened between the time Sidney Powell left after a screaming meeting on December 18 and the time Trump announced the rally in the early hours of December 19, leading thousands of his most rabid followers to start planning to come to DC?

87. On December 19, 2020, after cultivating widespread anger and resentment for weeks with his knowingly false claims of election fraud, the Defendant urged his supporters to travel to Washington on the day of the certification proceeding, tweeting, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Throughout late December, he repeatedly urged his supporters to come to Washington for January 6.

That December 19 tweet, and the phone it was sent from, was another kind of murder weapon, the shot that would set off the entire riot. And to figure out who was wielding it, the circumstances in which it went off, investigators would work backwards from where it was stored, on Twitter.

They would want to know, too, how Ali Alexander and Alex Jones copped on so quickly — whether any of the participants in the DM lists via which Stop the Steal was coordinated had a user who also had access to Trump’s Twitter account.

Even before Trump became President, his communication habits made it very difficult to pin down his actions. Roger Stone, for example, would call Trump during the 2016 election on Trump’s cell, his Trump Tower phone, two work phones, via three different assistants, and Keith Schiller. And Stone often used other people’s phones to call on.

Trump still has a habit of using other people’s phones. The stolen documents indictment reflects Molly Michael telling Walt Nauta that Trump had had her phone. Several of Trump’s aides were asked by J6C whether Trump ever used their phones; several probably didn’t tell the truth in response.

But much of execution of January 6 went through the single most stable means of communication Donald Trump had: his Twitter account. And to attribute any actions that happened using Trump’s Twitter account, DOJ needed as much data as possible about who else used it and in what circumstances.

User attribution is important. Especially with a guy who has the ability to murder by tweet.

Trump’s Federated Conspiracies and Racketeering: How Georgia and the Federal Charges May Interact

/203 Comments/in , , /by

The Georgia indictment and Trump’s federal indictment tell the same story. But those stories have some key differences, that will create an interesting prisoner’s dilemma for those involved. The different exposure of Sidney Powell in both and the different treatment of Ruby Freeman show how they’re different.

Sidney Powell’s lawsuits and alleged hacking

The last overt act described in the federal indictment against Donald Trump describes how, at 3:41AM, Mike Pence certified the election for Joe Biden.

123. At 3:41 a.m. on January 7, as President of the Senate, the Vice President announced the certified results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden.

But two of the charged conspiracies — the 18 USC 371 conspiracy to defraud the US and the 18 USC 241 conspiracy against rights — go through January 20. Since they are charged as conspiracies, anything Trump’s co-conspirators said and did after January 6 can also be used to prove the case against Trump.

That’s particularly notable for Trump’s Crazy Kraken Conspirator, Sidney Powell. As noted, the only overt act of hers described in Trump’s federal indictment has to do with her lawsuits targeting Dominion.

Those lawsuits don’t figure in the Georgia indictment at all — not even the November 25 one against Georgia explicitly described in the federal indictment. Instead, Powell’s primary criminal exposure in the Georgia indictment has to do with her conspiracy to get access to Dominion data from Coffee County, a conspiracy that — the Georgia indictment alleges — started on December 1, continued through their access of the data on January 7, after which the data continued to be exploited until at least April. Powell’s larger effort to exploit Dominion data, even that obtained in Michigan, plays a part in the RICO conspiracy.

In the federal case, Powell’s lawsuits serve both to justify backstopping of the electoral certification (meaning, you had to have lawsuits to justify having fake electors) and to prove that Trump was magnifying fraud claims from someone — Powell — everyone openly labeled as batshit. If and when Jack Smith ever adds charges — against Powell, Trump, or his PAC — for fraudulent fundraising, his embrace of claims sourced to Powell will be important to prove he knew he was lying in his fundraising.

In the Georgia case, by contrast, she is charged with outright conspiracy to illegally access computers and election fraud associated with accessing the Dominion data.

The overall arc of the conspiracies is the same; the criminal exposure is radically different.

Death threats and interstate entrapment efforts

Paragraph 26 of the federal indictment describes how Rudy Giuliani lied in a Georgia hearing, including but not limited to about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, which resulted in death threats.

26. On December 10, four days before Biden’s validly ascertained electors were scheduled to cast votes and send them to Congress, Co-Conspirator 1 appeared at a hearing before the Georgia House of Representatives’ Government Affairs Committee. Co-Conspirator 1 played the State Farm Arena video again, and falsely claimed that it showed “voter fraud right in front of people’s eyes” and was “the tip of the iceberg.” Then, he cited two election workers by name, baselessly accused them of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine,” and suggested that they were criminals whose “places of work, their homes, should have been searched for evidence of ballots, for evidence of USB ports, for evidence of voter fraud.” Thereafter, the two election workers received numerous death threats.

Prosecutors are well aware of the import of Trump’s bullying — they made it part of their bid for a protective order. But, probably in an effort to stave off any real claim about charging First Amendment protected speech, such bullying is not charged, not even Trump’s targeting of Mike Pence.

The Georgia indictment, as Rick Hasen also notes, focuses much more on crimes targeting Freeman and Moss.

Rudy is charged for the lies he told on December 10 in Count 7. He and Ray Stallings are charged with soliciting Georgia Representatives to violate their oaths in Count 6.

But in addition to that, Lutheran minister Steve Lee is charged with two counts for trying to trick Freeman, once on December 14 and again on December 15, into confessing to voter fraud that didn’t happen. And he is charged along with Kanye’s publicist, Trevian Kutti, and Black Votes for Trump official Harrison Floyd with another attempt to get her to confess to voter fraud on January 4 and an attempt to get her to lie to the state.

These are alleged crimes that arise from Freeman’s status as a Fulton County election worker and as such are properly the concern of Fani Willis, not Jack Smith.

All of which is to say that even though both the RICO charge and Trump’s conspiracies map the same conduct, they tie to different crimes, with different kinds of exposure for different people.

Prisoner’s Dilemma: Already Charged Co-Conspirators versus Not-Yet Charged Co-Conspirators

One way the Georgia and federal indictments will interact is in the relative pressure between already being charged, in a state with strict pardon rules, and being not-yet charged, in a venue where Trump has pardoned his way out of criminal trouble in the past.

Five people are named as co-conspirators in both: Rudy (CC1 in the federal indictment), John Eastman (CC2), Powell (CC3), Jeffrey Clark (CC4) and Ken Chesebro (CC5).

Some of these people, like Sidney Powell, Trump might not consider pardoning in any case. Plus, Trump’s closest associates have spent the last week or so throwing her under the bus. But thus far at least, Powell’s personal legal risk is far greater in Georgia than federally.

Others, though, may think seriously about how much harder it would be to get a pardon for Georgia than a Federal indictment, where the next Republican President, possibly including Donald Trump, would be able to pardon them.

In other words, if people who are likely to be indicted by Jack Smith think the charges in Georgia are at all serious, they may flip sooner rather than later, which will likely lead them to cooperate in the DC case as well.

There’s a reason why prisoner’s dilemma is the basis for so much game theory. The way these two competing indictments intersect may rewrite that doctrine, something called Trump defendant dilemma.

Then consider the timing. Later this month — potentially on August 28, three days after all Willis defendants have to turn themselves in — Jack Smith’s prosecutors will fight for a January 2 trial date, which is ambitious. Last night, Fani Willis said she wanted to bring all 19 defendants to trial within 6 months, which would be late February or March.

Even if one or both of those dates would hold, it might require Alvin Bragg be willing to reschedule his own trial on the hush payment cover-up.

But if even just one of these trials goes forward on such an ambitious schedule, it would mean that this Trump defendant dilemma will be playing out even as GOP primary voters go to the polls.

The Bubble Three

One of the most interesting other ways the Georgia indictment and the federal one will interact is in how the three men on the bubble — Mike Roman, Boris Epshteyn, and Mark Meadows — respond. While we’re not yet sure whether Boris or Roman is CC6 in the federal indictment, there’s more support right now for it being Boris. Both men had their phones seized by DOJ in September. Both men sat (or said they’d sit) for proffers with Jack Smith’s team; neither has been (publicly) charged by DOJ yet.

Roman is charged in the Georgia indictment, both with the RICO charge and the Trump side of each of the fake elector charges. He’s the guy who was interacting directly with people in Georgia (and with CC4, Robert Sinners, who cooperated even with the January 6 Committee). If Roman actually did start cooperating with Jack Smith’s team, there’d be no down-side to doing so with Willis’ team, either.

Boris, by contrast, is almost certainly CC3; Act 109, describing a Chesebro email to Eastman and CC3 matches this passage from the January 6 Report.

By that point, Chesebro and Eastman were coordinating their arguments about the fake-elector votes and how they should be used. On January 1, 2021, Chesebro sent an email to Eastman and Epshteyn that recommended that Vice President Pence derail the joint session of Congress. In it, he raised the idea of Vice President Pence declaring “that thereare two competing slates of electoral votes” in several States, and taking the position that only he, or possibly Congress, could “resolve any disputes concerning them.”122

So Boris is not facing the charges that can’t be pardoned but may he facing the charges that can be.

Finally, there is Meadows. The slim exposure for Meadows in this indictment — he is charged in the RICO charge and the solicitation charge tied to the Raffensperger call — may explain why he was not listed as a co-conspirator, yet, for the Jack Smith indictment. The most damning acts attributed to him in the indictment were:

  • Sometime in December: Meeting with Johnny McEntee and asking him for a plan to throw out half the electoral votes in some states
  • December 22: Unsuccessfully attempting to enter the audit site in Georgia
  • December 27: Offering Trump campaign funds if it would help get signature verification done by January 6

Other than that, Meadows’ actions entail setting up phone calls on which Trump lied and solicited unlawful acts. Meadows has a superb lawyer and might try his luck with these charges.

If any of these men cooperated — if any already is (though I really think Meadows is not) — then it would provide both prosecutors a pivotal person in the conspiracies (and, in Boris’ case, the stolen documents conspiracy as well).

As I said above, the interaction of these two indictments, along with the uncertainty as Jack Smith continues to investigate, creates a fierce game of prisoner’s dilemma. And that’s before Smith charges any financial crimes tied to fraudulent fundraising.

Update: Meadows has moved to remove the charges against him to federal court — a move he may have more success doing than Trump.

The Various Kinds of Georgia Crimes in the RICO Indictment

/161 Comments/in , /by

There’s so much good reporting out of Georgia that I’m going to mostly leave close coverage of the Georgia case to them going forward.

But the Georgia prosecution will interact with Jack Smith’s ongoing investigation in interesting ways. To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia.

Those counts fall into the following groups:

Lies to and solicitation of Georgia officials

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheeley with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

Fake electors

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheeley, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

Attempts to entrap Ruby Freeman

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

Lies about Georgia

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

Tampering with Coffee County tabulators

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

Lies during the investigation

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheeley with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level). But ultimately it is built on a series of crimes charged to protect the integrity of Georgia’s government. They stand for the principle that you can’t simply come into Georgia and lie and defraud in an attempt to get state officials to violate their oaths of office.

Update: Corrected spelling of Cheeley’s last name.

Alberto Gonzales Lectures Jack Goldsmith about Perception versus Reality in a Democracy

/120 Comments/in , , , , /by

I never, never imagined I’d see the day when Alberto Gonzales would school Jack Goldsmith on how to defend democracy.

Once upon a time, remember, it fell to Goldsmith to school Gonzales that the President (or Vice President) could not simply unilaterally authorize torture and surveillance programs that violate the law by engaging in cynical word games.

But now, Goldsmith is the one befuddled by word games and Gonzales is the one reminding that rule of law must operate in the realm of truth, not propaganda.

In a widely circulated NYT op-ed last week, Goldmith warned that democracy may suffer from the January 6 indictment of Donald Trump because of the perceived unfairness (Goldsmith doesn’t say, perceived by whom) of the treatment of Trump.

This deeply unfortunate timing looks political and has potent political implications even if it is not driven by partisan motivations. And it is the Biden administration’s responsibility, as its Justice Department reportedly delayed the investigation of Mr. Trump for a year [1] and then rushed to indict him well into the G.O.P. primary season. The unseemliness of the prosecution will most likely grow if the Biden campaign or its proxies use it as a weapon against Mr. Trump if he is nominated.

This is all happening against the backdrop of perceived unfairness in the Justice Department’s earlier investigation, originating in the Obama administration, of Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia in the 2016 general election. Anti-Trump texts by the lead F.B.I. investigator [2], a former F.B.I. director who put Mr. Trump in a bad light through improper disclosure of F.B.I. documents and information [3], transgressions by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials in securing permission to surveil a Trump associate [4] and more were condemned by the Justice Department’s inspector general even as he found no direct evidence of political bias in the investigation. The discredited Steele dossier, which played a consequential role in the Russia investigation and especially its public narrative, grew out of opposition research by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. [5]

And then there is the perceived unfairness in the department’s treatment of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, in which the department has once again violated the cardinal principle of avoiding any appearance of untoward behavior in a politically sensitive investigation. Credible whistle-blowers have alleged wrongdoing and bias in the investigation [6], though the Trump-appointed prosecutor denies it. And the department’s plea arrangement with Hunter Biden came apart, in ways that fanned suspicions of a sweetheart deal, in response to a few simple questions by a federal judge [7]. [my emphasis; numbers added]

Rather than parroting perceptions, in his op-ed, Gonzales corrects a core misperception by pointing out a key difference between Hillary’s treatment and Trump’s: Hillary cooperated.

I recently heard from friends and former colleagues whom I trust and admire, people of common sense and strong values, who say that our justice system appears to be stacked against Trump and Republicans in general, that it favors liberals and Democrats, and that it serves the interests of the Democratic Party and not the Constitution. For example, they cite the department’s 2018 decision not to charge Hillary Clinton criminally for keeping classified documents on a private email server while she was secretary of state during the Obama administration.

I can understand the skepticism, but based on the known facts in each case, I do not share it.

[snip]

A prosecutor’s assessment of the evidence affects decisions on whether to charge on a set of known facts, and government officials under investigation, such as Clinton, often cooperate with prosecutors to address potential wrongdoing. By all accounts, Trump has refused to cooperate.

By contrast, Goldsmith simply ignores the backstory to virtually every single perceived claim in his op-ed.

  1. Aside from a slew of other problems with the linked Carol Leonnig article, her claims of delay in the investigation do not account for the overt investigative steps taken against three of Trump’s co-conspirators in 2021, and nine months of any delay came from Trump’s own frivolous Executive Privilege claims
  2. Trump’s Deputy Attorney General chose to release Peter Strzok’s texts (which criticized Hillary and Bernie Sanders, in addition to Trump), but not those of agents who wrote pro-Trump texts on their FBI devices; that decision is currently the subject of a Privacy Act lawsuit
  3. After Trump used Jim Comey’s gross mistreatment of Hillary in actions that was among the most decisive acts of the 2016 election as his excuse to fire Comey, DOJ IG investigated Comey for publicly revealing the real reason Trump fired him
  4. No Justice Department officials were faulted for the Carter Page errors, and subsequent reports from DOJ IG revealed that the number of Woods file errors against Page were actually fewer than in other applications; note, too, that Page was a former associate of Trump’s, not a current one
  5. Investigations against both Hillary (two separate ones predicated on Clinton Cash) and Trump were predicated using oppo research, but perceptions about the Steele dossier ended up being more central because in significant part through the way Oleg Deripaska played both sides
  6. One of the IRS agents Goldsmith treats as credible refused to turn over his emails for discovery for eight months when asked and the other revealed that he thought concerns about Sixth Amendment problems with the case were merely a sign of “liberal” bias; both have ties to Chuck Grassley and one revealed that ten months after obtaining a laptop that appears to have been the result of hacking, DOJ had still never forensically validated the contents of it
  7. In the wake of that organized campaign against Hunter Biden, a Trump appointed US Attorney limited the scope of the plea which led to a Trump appointed judge refusing to accept it

For each instance of perceived unfairness Goldsmith cites — again, without explaining who is doing the perceiving — there’s a backstory of how that perception was constructed.

Which is the more important insight Gonzales offers: That perceived unfairness Goldsmith merely parrots, unquestioned? Trump deliberately created it.

[A]s I watched a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, be arraigned in federal court for attempting to obstruct official proceedings and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, I found myself less troubled by the actions of former president Donald Trump than by the response of a significant swath of the American people to Trump’s deepening legal woes.

[snip]

While Trump has a right to defend himself, his language and actions since 2016 have fueled a growing sense among many Americans that our justice system is rigged and biased against him and his supporters.

Sadly, this has led on the right to a growing distrust of and rage against the Justice Department.

[snip]

We have a duty as Americans not to blindly trust our justice system, but we also shouldn’t blindly trust those who say it is unjust. Our government officials have a duty to act at all times with integrity, and when appropriate to inform and reassure the public that their decisions are consistent based on provable evidence and in accordance with the rule of law.

Defendants do not have the same duty. They can, and sometimes do, say almost anything to prove their innocence — no matter how damaging to our democracy and the rule of law. [my emphasis]

Trump’s false claims of grievance, his concerted, seven year effort to evade any accountability, are themselves the source of damage to democracy and rule of law, not the perception that arises from Trump’s propaganda.

Which beings me back to the question of who is perceiving this unfairness. By labeling these things “perceived” reality, Goldsmith abdicates any personal responsibility.

Goldsmith abdicates personal responsibility for debunking the more obvious false claims, such as that Hunter Biden, after five years of relentless attacks assisted by Bill Barr’s creation of a way to ingest known Russian disinformation about him without holding Rudy legally accountable for what he did to obtain it, after five years of dedicated investigation by an IRS group normally focused on far bigger graft, somehow got a sweetheart deal.

More troubling, from a law professor, Goldsmith abdicates personal responsibility for his own false claims about the legal novelty of the January 6 indictment against Trump.

The case involves novel applications of three criminal laws and raises tricky issues of Mr. Trump’s intent, his freedom of speech and the contours of presidential power.

One reason the investigation took so long — one likely reason why DOJ stopped well short of alleging Trump incited the violence on the Capitol and Mike Pence personally, in spite of all the evidence he did so deliberately and with malign intent — is to eliminate any First Amendment claim. One might repeat this claim if one had not read the indictment itself and instead simply repeated Trump’s lawyers claims or the reports of political journalists themselves parroting Trump’s claims, but not after a review of how the conspiracies are constructed.

As to the claim that all three statutes are novel applications? That’s an argument that says a conspiracy to submit documents to the federal government that were identified as illegal in advance is novel. Kenneth Chesbro wrote down in advance that the fake elector plot was legally suspect, then went ahead and implemented the plan anyway. John Eastman acknowledged repeatedly in advance that the requests they were making of Mike Pence were legally suspect, but then went ahead and told an armed, angry crowd otherwise.

The claim that all three charges are novel applications is especially obnoxious with regards to 18 USC 1512(c)(2) and (k), because the application has already been used more than 300 times (including with people who did not enter the Capitol). The DC Circuit has already approved the treatment of the vote certification as an official proceeding. And — as I personally told Goldsmith — whatever definition of “corruptly” the DC Circuit and SCOTUS will eventually adopt, it will apply more easily to Trump than to his 300 mobsters. And if SCOTUS were to overturn the application of obstruction to the vote certification — certainly within the realm of possibility from a court whose oldest member has a spouse who might similarly be charged — the response would already be baked in.

To argue that 300 of Trump’s supporters should be charged and he should not is simply obscene.

American democracy, American rule of law, is no doubt in great peril and the prosecutions of Donald Trump for the damage he did to both will further test them.

But those of us who want to preserve democracy and rule of law have an ethical obligation not just to parrot the manufactured grievances of the demagogue attempting to end it, absolving ourselves of any moral responsibility to sort through these claims, but instead to insist on truth as best as we can discern it.